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Fonts fixed for SeaMonkey

March 15, 2015 — BarryK
For a very very long time, using Quirky and my earlier puppies, there has been a problem with some characters not rendering on some web sites.

These characters only display as small rectangles, with their hex code inside, for example:

E629, E62A, E62C, E631

This site is an example:
http://www.transperth.wa.gov.au/Journey-Planner

These missing characters seem to be "picture", or "glyph" icons.

There are many sets of glyph TTF font sets, but I found what I wanted here:
http://dquinn.net/how-to-fix-broken-font-icons-in-chrome-32-for-entypo-web-font-in-gumby-framework/

I downloaded 'entypo.ttf', to /usr/share/fonts/default/TTF.

While I was at it, decided to update the DejaVu Sans fonts, got them from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dejavu/files/dejavu/2.34/dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.34.tar.bz2

Then inside the 'TTF" folder, ran:

# mkfontscale
# mkfontdir


Then, in any folder:

# fc-cache -f -v

Yes, the Entypo font set has fixed, the Transperth site, but not all.
For example, the characters are still missing here:
https://twitter.com/Saygus

...so, I will experiment some more.

Comments

I have added these Semantic UI characters:
http://semantic-ui.com/elements/icon.html

...I have renamed 'icons.ttf' to 'semanticui.ttf'

It fixes this site:
https://twitter.com/Saygus

However, still need the 'entypo.ttf' for this site:
http://www.transperth.wa.gov.au/Journey-Planner

But, this site is not yet fully covered:
http://www.sugarvenom.com.au/products/amy-mineral-lip-gloss

... it has these:

E801, E800, E804, E813

http://kennison.name/files/css/semanticui/packaged/fonts/icons.ttf
http://weloveiconfonts.com/api/fonts/fontelico/fontelico.ttf

See also:
http://weloveiconfonts.com/api/fonts/fontelico/fontelico.svg

However, that Sugar Venom site still has missing characters:

F611, F610, F650, F641

This site:
http://www.transperth.wa.gov.au/Journey-Planner

Has the same characters as Entypo, but different icons.

It really is unfortunate that some web sites are expecting a particular icon font-set to be installed.
I guess this is a MS Windows icon-set.

The icon characters all display at these sites:
http://www.transperth.wa.gov.au/Journey-Planner
https://twitter.com/Saygus
http://www.sugarvenom.com.au/products/amy-mineral-lip-gloss

So, I need to go figure out what I am missing in Quirky, that Fatdog has.

Just a note on the side:
When I first booted Fatdog 700, it was OK at first, then characters started to be missing all over the screen. It quickly became unusable.
This is a bug in the Intel Xorg driver, on my laptop.

In a way I am relieved that Fatdog also has this problem! It is not just something that I am doing wrong in Quirky.

Unfortunately, Fatdog does not seem to have an "Xorg Wizard". Nor even and "Exit from X to prompt".
So, I renamed /etc/X11/Xorg.conf1 to Xorg.conf and changed the video driver from "vesa" to "modesetting" and restarted X.
Now screen rendering is OK.

Anyway, back on fonts, the saga continues...

My understanding was deficient. I was thinking that I had to supply all the fonts locally, but there was the puzzle of the icon font-sets being so different -- that is, a code say 'F179' may represent a different picture, depending on the font-set used.

The icon-sets used by the sites in the previous three links, can be downloaded by their http servers. In SM Preferences, tick the checkbox:

Appearances -> Fonts -> Allow documents to use other fonts

I will now set this as the default for SM.

Those icon fonts that I was experimenting with. I will keep semanticui.ttf in Quirky, I think, as it does look like a pretty standard set of icon characters, and will be a fallback if the server cannot supply the required characters for some reason.

...maybe also for local viewing of web pages?

Tags: linux